About
Cortical Labs grows human neurons on silicon chips and uses them to run computation. The Melbourne team made global headlines in 2022 when their lab-grown neural cultures, branded DishBrain, learned to play Pong faster than a comparable software AI model. That research has now turned into a product. The CL1 device, launched in 2025, is the first commercial biological computer that ships as a unit you can buy and code against. They also run Cortical Cloud, a way to deploy code to live neural cultures hosted in their lab without your own wet-lab setup. This is genuinely early-stage hardware. Whether biological computing scales to anything resembling mainstream AI workloads is an open question. But Cortical Labs is the only Australian company seriously attempting to commercialise this hybrid biological-silicon approach, and the published research is real.